The coat of arms of the Principality of Moldavia, to which Bukovina belonged until 1775, featured the moon, the morning star and, in the centre, an aurochs. The aurochs also featured in the coat of arms of the Austrian Crown Land – here on a shield divided into blue and red sections, with three golden stars. A ducal coronet was depicted above the shield. The Romanian national coat of arms of the interwar period also featured the aurochs. The coat of arms of Bukovina during the era of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic differed fundamentally in its design. Beech leaves and the two Bukovinian rivers, the Dniester and the Prut, were depicted beneath a city gate; the hammer and sickle replaced the crown. The coat of arms of today’s Chernivtsi Oblast combines the city gate of Czernowitz, the Moldavian eagle and beech leaves as a symbol of Bukovina.

Following the collapse of the Habsburg Empire, the future of the Crown Land of Bukovina hung in the balance. The last governor, Josef Graf von Ezdorf (1846–1931), handed the province over to the Ukrainian and Romanian National Councils, together with a directive to shape the region’s future jointly and by mutual agreement – an obvious reminder given the tensions between the two ethnic groups. Although a Ukrainian and a Romanian member of parliament, Omeljan Popovyč and Aurel von Onciul, initially assumed joint control of the government, their period of joint rule was short-lived. Romania subsequently secured power in the region, firstly through military action (the capture of Czernowitz on 11 November 1918) and secondly through a pseudo-democratic act. On 28 November 1918, the ‘General Congress of Bukovina’ took place in Chernivtsi, at which the delegates resolved to permanently unite Bukovina with the Kingdom of Romania. The Ukrainian independence movement was powerless to oppose this. Only invited guests were granted admission and the right to vote at the Congress; the main criticism was that these guests did not reflect the ethnic and political spectrum of Bukovina’s population. Of the 74 people invited, 48 were Romanians, which did not correspond to the ethnic proportions in the region. In the run-up to the event, the Jews of Bukovina demanded a guarantee that the Romanian National Council would advocate for their full civil rights in Greater Romania, as, unlike in the Habsburg Empire, there had been no equal rights for Jews in Romania until 1923. The Jewish inhabitants of Bukovina feared a legal setback. In fact, no such guarantee was forthcoming, so the Jewish People’s Council declined to take part in the General Congress. The German demand for cultural autonomy was initially largely met. Ukrainian deputies, however, were not invited. Following the annexation of Bukovina to Romania, brought about in this manner and legitimised by the Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye (Southern Bukovina in 1919, Northern Bukovina in 1920), a gradual ‘Romanianisation’ of the region took place. This included integration into the centrally governed Romanian state and its administrative structures, as well as a nationality policy that took on repressive features towards the non-Romanian population, even though this group (Ukrainians, Jews, Germans and Poles) together accounted for 60 per cent of the total population at the time. From then on, a near-native command of Romanian was required for government posts in the administration and judiciary, which in practice meant that many were excluded. The Ukrainian population came under the greatest pressure and responded with resistance, in some cases armed. Consequently, a state of emergency remained in force in their settlement areas until 1928. By the early 1920s, many of their political leaders were in prison, meaning there was no independent Ukrainian party. Furthermore, schools were a key focus of the Romanianisation campaign: the provision of lessons in German and Ukrainian was deliberately scaled back during the 1920s. In 1927, the last Ukrainian-language school was forced to close. In 1913, there were 97 German-language schools throughout Bukovina, most of which fell victim to the subsequent Romanianisation policy (in 1919/20, 64 primary schools remained, 31 in 1923–24 and just one in 1927–28, although there was a slight resurgence thereafter). The pressure to conform linguistically was intense; however, thanks to the large number of German-speaking Jews, German largely managed to hold its ground as the lingua franca of the towns. Things also became difficult for the region’s Jewish population; the gender equality enshrined for them in the Paris Suburban Treaties was delayed. Consequently, only a few Jews identified with the new state. Many studied abroad and joined the Zionist movement. The main governing party during this period was the liberal Democratic Party of Union (Partidul Democrat al Unirii), which, until the end of the 1920s, was the only party to have consistently established itself within the Bukovinian political landscape. In general, the 1920s are described as a relatively positive period for democratic development, despite all the signs of crisis that were already evident in the parliamentary system at that time. From the late 1920s onwards, parties and movements in Romania that openly agitated against minorities began to gain support, putting more moderate parties, such as the Peasants’ Party (Partidul Național Țărănesc), under pressure once again. From 1934 onwards, under pressure from unemployed Romanian youth, politicians demanded that Ukrainians and Jews be completely barred from accessing educational institutions and government posts. Their presence in commercial enterprises was restricted. When the National Christian Party (Partidul Național Creștin) came to power in 1937, state-sanctioned anti-Semitism intensified. Numerous Jews were stripped of their citizenship, which led to protests from abroad. Nevertheless, the Romanian authorities continued to pursue this policy. In Bukovina, by 1939, a third of the Jewish population had lost their citizenship, including many long-established residents of Chernivtsi. The so-called ‘Year of the Russians’ in 1940, with the Soviet Union’ s annexation of the northern part of the region, meant expropriation, nationalisation and deportation for around 12,000 Bukovinians, including 3,500 Jews. Many Romanians fled to the southern part of the region, which was still under Romanian control; the German population was resettled in both parts as a result of different treaties between the German Reich and, respectively, Romania (for Southern Bukovina) and the Soviet Union (for Northern Bukovina). For the Jewish population, the worst was yet to come: when Romanian troops retook the northern part in July 1941, the Jews were regarded as collaborators, which served as a justification for their persecution. Consequently, the Jewish population of Bukovina fell victim to repression and attacks by various groups. In the summer of 1941, pogroms took place, carried out partly by special units and partly by local residents. This was followed in the autumn of 1941 by ghettoisation and deportation to Transnistria, an event that became known as the Romanian Holocaust. The exact number of surviving Bukovinian Jews is unknown. In November 1943, 34,149 of the deported Bukovinian Jews were still alive in Transnistria. No further specific figures from Transnistria have been recorded. In Chernivtsi itself, 17,000 Jews survived the war because they were issued with special identity documents. The others fell victim to malnutrition, illness, epidemics and mass shootings. Most of the survivors subsequently decided to emigrate, often first to Romania, Germany or Austria, before many of them moved on to Palestine or the USA.

Before 1775, only a few German settlers – for example, those originating from Galicia and Transylvania who had moved there in the Middle Ages – lived in Bukovina. It was not until the Habsburgs came to power that a targeted, albeit temporary, settlement policy was introduced. Settlers from German-speaking regions were recruited to further develop the sparsely populated region. In return, they were promised certain privileges, such as significant tax relief and exemption from military service (until 1830/31). The state also provided land, houses, tools and livestock. Overall, the Germans can be divided – depending on the classification used – into three or four distinct groups. Hugo Weczerka, for example, distinguishes between:

1. farmers and rural craftsmen from south-west Germany, who settled in the hilly countryside between the mountains and the Pruth Valley (main phase 1782–1787),
2. miners from Spiš who settled in the valleys of the Vltava and Golden Bistrica rivers and worked predominantly in ore mining (1784–1809),
3. German-Bohemian glassmakers, forest workers and forest farmers who were settled on the edge of the Carpathians (1793–1817 and 1835–1850),
4. the urban middle classes, who came from the various Crown Lands (1775–1918).

Other researchers simply name the groups, namely ‘Swabians’ (which was a generalised collective term for German-speaking people from the west),‘Zipsers’and ‘Böhmerwäldlers’, between whom there were marked linguistic, religious and cultural differences. In the late 19th century, the first clubs and associations were founded which identified as Christian-German, thereby laying the foundations for a German-nationalist regional identity. Despite a gradual trend towards the integration of the settler groups, the Germans in Bukovina did not regard themselves as a separate and distinct group until the end of the First World War. It was not until the interwar period that, under pressure from Romanianisation and against a backdrop of general nationalist agitation, the common ground between the German settler groups was emphasised more strongly: In the commemorative publication marking the 25th anniversary of the most important of these organisations, the Association of Christian Germans in Bukovina, founded in 1897, the separation of the German groups was highlighted just as much as the slow process of integration was emphasised: It was only the ‘gathering of all Germans, so widely scattered and separated by various barriers, into a single association [that] could give the concept of Bukovinian Germanness its true meaning and expression.’ The concept of the Bukovinian Germans only became firmly established towards the end of the 1920s. In the 1910s and 1920s, the phrase ‘German identity in Bukovina’ or ‘Bukovinian German identity’ appears repeatedly. Even in the *Handwörterbuch des Grenz- und Auslandsdeutschtums* (*Concise Dictionary of German Identity in Border Regions and Abroad*), it is noted that ‘the origins of the Bukovina Germans are so diverse and their shared destiny in their new homeland has not had a long or deep enough effect’, so that ‘ethnic consciousness and the will to form a national community are not strong enough everywhere’, despite the discernible ‘clear adherence to German identity’. To put it more bluntly, it could be said that it was only under the continued influence of Nazi rhetoric on ethnic groups, and above all through the experiences of resettlement and the loss of their homeland, that many Bukovinian Germans arrived at a lasting sense of identity as Bukovinian Germans. The German colonists were primarily instructed to integrate into the existing settlements. Consequently, predominantly German settlements sprang up alongside those that already existed; it was chiefly among the German Bohemians that new villages were founded. There were therefore no compact German settlement areas in Bukovina – in stark contrast to the settlement patterns of the Romanians and Ukrainians in Bukovina, or indeed to those of the Germans in neighbouring Bessarabia. Only in a few areas was there (until the resettlement following the Ribbentrop–Molotov Pact in 1940) a larger proportion of the population. Notable examples include Rosch/Roša, now a district of Czernowitz, which was predominantly populated by Germans, as well as Radautz/Rădăuți and the surrounding area. Overall, the proportion of Germans in the total population never exceeded 9 per cent by 1910 (1850: 6.5 per cent).

Economic difficulties during the interwar period and the pro-German nationalist leanings of many people offer possible explanations as to why the majority of the German population agreed to the‘Heim ins Reich’resettlement in 1940. The fear of Soviet power should also be mentioned. In the wake of the Ribbentrop–Molotov Pact, a Soviet ultimatum was issued in June 1940 demanding the evacuation of Northern Bukovina. The resettlement from the northern part was laid down in a German–Soviet agreement dated 5 September 1940. The agreement explicitly declared the resettlement to be voluntary. The resettlement of Germans from the southern part of Bukovina was, in practice, voluntary. To facilitate this, a separate treaty was concluded between Germany and Romania. In the autumn of 1940, a total of 95,770 people from both areas were transferred to German territory (Northern Bukovina: 43,641; Southern Bukovina: 52,129). This figure exceeded the number of Germans in Bukovina before the war (approx. 75,000), even though a few hundred families remained behind, particularly in the south. Among those resettled were the non-German partners of the resettlers, as well as Ukrainian- and Romanian-speaking individuals with no German family ties, who took advantage of this opportunity to escape from Soviet-controlled territory. For most Germans from Bukovina, the‘Heim ins Reich’resettlement programme was a great disappointment. They were often held in camps for months or even years before finally being allowed to settle – frequently on farms and in houses in the incorporated territories of Poland, from which Jewish and non-Jewish Poles had previously been expelled. A comparatively large number of so-called ‘Buchenland Germans’ were deemed ‘unsuitable for resettlement’ and were sent directly to the ‘Altreich’, with their communities (and often their families) torn apart. Furthermore, as with other‘Heim ins Reich’ resettlements, there was a close link between resettlement and selection policies, whereby people deemed ‘racially inferior’ were singled out, transported to ‘sanatoriums’ and subsequently murdered.^[17] At the end of the war, several thousand Bukovina Germans were sent back to Southern Bukovina by the Soviets, whilst others continued to live in Austria, in the Soviet Occupation Zone/GDR, or emigrated overseas. The majority of the Bukovina Germans, however – around 60,000 people – made their way to West Germany after the war. In Munich, the “Landsmannschaft der deutschen Umsiedler aus der Bukowina in Deutschland e.V.” (Association of German Resettlers from Bukovina in Germany) was founded in 1949; it was later renamed the “Landsmannschaft der Buchenlanddeutschen”. In 1955, the administrative district of Swabia took on the patronage of this group. In 1989, the Bukovina Institute opened its doors in Augsburg. As a result, ties between the Bukovina Germans in Germany, the district of Swabia and the present-day population of Northern and Southern Bukovina continue to be maintained. Following German reunification, the Germans who remained in Bukovina have gained a greater sense of self-assurance. In Ukraine, an Austrian cultural society based in Chernivtsi serves as an umbrella organisation, whilst in Romania they belong to the ‘Democratic Forum of Germans in Romania’. As outlined, these are small groups in terms of numbers.